A budget gives you a number. A strategy plan must show how the business will reach it.
In The Strategy Management Process, Bill Canady lays out a practical sequence for CEOs and leadership teams: assess the business, choose the work it can carry, reconcile the numbers, assign ownership, design the monthly review, and prepare the board decision.
Follow Ironwood Process Components, a composite industrial company, as its leadership team works through six phases and the documents each one produces.
Situation Assessment: Build seven evidence-based insights before proposing solutions.
Framework: Compare initiatives in a common format, test capacity, and decide what to fund, defer, or decline.
Business Plan: Reconcile top-down and bottom-up numbers, close the gap with decisions, and produce the One-Page Plan and Locked Budget.
Deployment: Use the X-Matrix to connect objectives, annual goals, measures, and one accountable owner.
Cadence: Set monthly plan values and thresholds, investigate misses, and run a review that produces decisions with owners and dates.
Boardroom: Assemble a plan a director can trace from the target to the person responsible for delivering it.
The discipline is Signed Twice: the team commits first, and the board approves second. The book carries the process into the first ninety days, the annual calendar, and the planning cycle across three years.
Worked examples, practical questions, and a short Field Guide sampler connect the ideas to the pages a leadership team will use. The complete companion Field Guide is a separate workbook.
